I’ll get to the Monkees in a minute.

In the video above, it is suggested to us that the man firing the gun is shooting at people trying to escape the fire at the union hall in Odessa. That would be SOP in terrorist acts, the same reason why the US will attack with drones, and then later return when people are helping the victims to attack again. It’s called the “double tap.”

RT presents an interesting chronology of events that led up to that fire. Judge for yourself.
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From my vantage point, it helps to remember that the Americans are very good at agitation by use of media and professional agents provocateur. Some of the most memorable battles in our history involved people sent in to stir up violence to justify a police response. Two such events in my lifetime were at the Chicago Democratic convention in 1968, where a police riot was depicted as rioting kids, and the so-called Battle in Seattle in 1999, where a peaceful demonstration against the WTO become a bloody confrontation due to agents provocateur.

So much of what became media spectacle in our past was put there on purpose, to keep public opinion under control. I don’t think that Kiev set out to create the Odessa fire, but that is certainly the source of the agitation that led to the event (which it is now blaming on the victims).
Continue reading “You thought it was just the Monkees?” →

Here’s some advice to readers on how to read American news coverage of any event where the truth is being kept from us: Look for “scare quotes” and passive voice.

Examples: Soviet President Putin says “American agents” are behind violence in Eastern Ukraine. Those quotation marks are a signal to American readers not to believe the words contained therein.

Passive voice merely means events occur without cause. When the US is fomenting violence, wars break out, violence occurs, tensions mount, all in the same manner that rain storms occur. The Russians have strong evidence that Kiev agents set the fire that killed so many in Odessa, but according to American sources, people were arguing and the damned fire just broke out! Huffington Post tells us that sides clashed and unrest gripped the place.

“Sides” and “unrest” are the agents behind the violence. Thanks HuffPo. You’re on top of your game, as usual.

That’s how it rolls here. That’s now our news media covers the news without actually giving us any useful information or saying anything true.
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Update: UK’s Daily Mail does not use passive voice, and says that violence is caused by “pro-Russian thugs with baseball bats.” We all know that baseball is a big sport over there, so those bats surely came from Russia. In fact, the bats say right on them that they are “Moscow Sluggers.”

31 people have died in fire in a trade union facility in Odessa.

The Trade Unions House was set on fire by pro-Kiev radicals after they surrounded and destroyed the tent camp of anti-government activists that stood in front of the building on Odessa’s Kulikovo Field Square. It was torched in a storming attempt after some of the anti-Maidan activists rallying in the square barricaded themselves inside the building.

What is interesting to me is how the US, at least within our borders (under our bubble), manages to distance itself from this violence, just like it has from the massive violence against Syria since 2011. Russian President Putin makes no bones, saying the US is orchestrating everything. The possibility – even the possibility – is never broached on our state-controlled news media in any its thousands of outlets. Such control of information is impressive.

Some regard the Lucas trilogy of Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi as great movie-making, and classic fiction. Indeed the characters that came out of that series are memorable and that action was enthralling. Special effects impossible before brought it all to life for a young generation. One person said to me that it was Harrison Ford that made the series successful, but that is an oversimplification. Carrie Fisher as Leia, on top of her hotness game and dressed down so that (as she said) “you could see all the way to Cuba”, had a lot to do with young boys and sexual fantasies. Fisher, as Leia, was accessible. Casting hit on the right qualities in choosing her and Ford as Hans Solo.

George Takei put up the photo to the right here on his Facebook page, and I think he has uncovered a fatal flaw. This kind of mistake in writing destroys willing suspension of disbelief, and destroys the whole of Star Wars. I have always been more a Trekkie myself, TNG, so I don’t care but will add one more failing of the Star Wars fantasy: At the end of Return, there is great joy and celebration that the Death Star is destroyed and that the Ewoks and everyone are now free of domination by the Dark Side. It won’t last. Lucas never thought it through. All they did, with the help, of course, of the Great White Interlopers Solo and Skywalker, was to win a battle. But there is no ground-level organizing. Solo and Leia are going off to make babies, Luke to save other planets. This one, the moon Endor, will shortly be taken over some other evil force. They are, after all, mighty warriors, these Ewoks, but they don’t think so good. If they did, they would not have needed a rescue.

Freedom, like dignity, strength or courage, cannot be given. It must be taken by force, and kept by fierce vigilance. I would like to know the exact date that the nascent Republic on the North American continent lost its freedom, but I don’t know. It was not 1947, though that date is important. I suspect that the Enlightenment window that had opened by 1776 had closed by 1812. Ours was a short and failed experiment, kept alive only by smoke and mirrors and two oceans that prevented invasions by the Dark Side. Consequently, we never needed a rescue, never had our cities destroyed. Our (white) people have not been tortured and put behind barbed wire.

Instead, we do that to others, and call it rescue.

Also while perusing Orwell below, just for the fun of it, I stumbled on this, again from 1984:

The invention of print … made it easier to manipulate public opinion, and film and the radio carried the process further. With the development of television, and the technical advance which made it possible to receive and transmit simultaneously on the same instrument, private life came to an end.

This reminds me of something Marshall McLuhan wrote, that with each advance in technology comes a corresponding loss of freedom. His example was an agent of a bank working out west before the telegraph, pretty much left to his own. Comes the telegraph, and he now has to be at his post all day long, as his bosses back east are monitoring him. Instant communication produced the first technology slave.

The Internet did not just stumble out into the open to be discovered by horny teenagers. The technology long existed, Kissinger having an early version in his brief case when he went to China in 1972. When it became available for public use it was already adapted to snooping, both by government and commercial enterprises. The “information superhighway” quickly became dot.commerce. Google started out as a good search engine because it did not sell its results to merchants, so that a query produced honest results. Now look at them. They are nothing but marketplace whores.

Worse yet, however, was the web browser itself, deliberately designed with back doors so advertisers could monitor our behavior. I only know what I know, and that due to some software I installed. Every time I open a page, in the upper right of my screen a list of companies attempting to monitor my activities appears. Google is always among them even though I do not use GMail, Google the search engine, or any Google product. Microsoft designed the Internet Explorer with merchants in mind, creating all kinds of back doors for entry into our private lives. They always claimed, when various entry points were discovered, that it was an accident.

We should not be surprised that NSA uses those same back doors. I do not have a whole lot of faith in outfits like Microsoft – that is, I do not think they are creative or innovative so much as having been lucky, and so were chosen to be the vehicle for entry of snoops into our private lives. Bill Gates is not that smart. It is not hard to see. Read into him what you will, but vision is not one of his strong traits. He ain’t got any. As the story goes, Netscape made the first browser, and Microsoft stole it. but in my heart of hearts, I wonder if Netscape made the first browser, NSA stole it, and then gave it to Microsoft and said “pretend you invented it, and make sure you leave room for us to move in too.”

The technology is not accidental, and the government and large corporations knew about it long before it became available to us. It would not have become available to us if it could not be compromised. It should come as no surprise that they are using it as Orwell’s two-way technology that ended our private lives.

I was looking up something else and stumbled on this familiar passage from 1984, which describes perfectly the reaction of people when they encounter clear and persuasive evidence that the major events of our time, such as the assassinations, 9/11 and Boston are not at all what we are told to believe they are:

The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to the young children, is called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest of arguments if the are inimical to Ingsoc [English Socialism], and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity. But stupidity is not enough. On the contrary, orthodoxy in the full sense demands control over one’s own mental processes as complete as that of a contortionist over his body.

Russian President Vladimir Putin is currently the object of a propaganda demonization campaign in the United States, and because the same power centers that controls our flow of information also owns the entertainment outlets, he is getting it from every angle, from Jimmy Fallon to Brian Williams, George Will to Barack Obama – from the smart comic to the stupid anchorman, the wily pundit to the weak political tool.

I don’t think this matters in the long run. We cannot stop the propaganda, and anyway, American public opinion has never been anything more than a force to be controlled, kept in its box so that it does not interfere with public policy. When it gets out of its box, as in the “sixties,” leaders get worried. So the demonization, the agitation, has to be ignored, and I think it is once we leave the bubble called the United States. We are our own self-fulfilling war machine, creating and then attacking new demons on a regular basis. We have to have our wars.

In the meantime, Putin is a figure of respect on the international stage, taken seriously in Europe and Asia as well as at home. His words are always measured, and deeds as well. No one doubts his ability to lead, where few outside this country think Obama has real chops.

Russia is currently measuring its response to the Ukrainian junta and its attacks on its own civilians. Putin says that the new ruling committee does have a support base, but not a majority of public approval, and since it is using its military to suppress its own population, and does not consult its parliament (but rather its masters abroad), uses that word, junta,

a council or committee for political or governmental purposes; especially : a group of persons controlling a government especially after a revolutionary seizure of power.

Since 9/11, America has shown awesome propaganda and brute force. The brutality with which the American regime attacked Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and (and currently Syria) was hard to watch, disgusting bestiality, but more disgusting was the complete control of perceptions and opinions within our borders. Any who objected to the attacks were marginalized, even driven off the airwaves for the slightest offense, as was Bill Maher (since dumbed down and tamed). To object to the masters and their whips required yelling out over the carnival and all of the dazzled patrons, none able to think clearly, all drunk with anger and seeking vindication. It was the golden moment for our fascists to attack, seven countries were to fall. I wanted to crawl into a hole, move to another country and be away from the ugliness and stupidity. There was no escape.

More troubling still was how public opinion was measured and manipulated yet again in 2008. Those with the whips knew that Bush had lost what little hold he had, that people were tired of that image as a fake leader and needed a new one, more cerebral and calming. Barack Obama was tagged not in 2008 to be president, but rather, and this is most discouraging, in 2004. We were told that this wonderfully charismatic young black man gave a dazzling speech at the Democratic Convention. It was fairly mundane. He was suggested to us as a potential great leader. But it is impressive to see that the leaders knew to answer to the moral indignation of the liberals of this land by giving them a black man or a woman to choose from, ideological validation. Both Obama and Hillary Clinton are tools and warmongers, she a raging psychopath (married to a suave and clever one), he not so easy to peg. If French President Sarkozy can be given credit for insight, he probably nailed it when he said that Barack Obama is merely a weak man.

Something has changed. The Ukrainian coup d’état was a product of brute force and naked aggression. All of American punditry is required to misidentify these elements, to pretend in public that these are democratic forces that seized power and who are not using military force against their own citizens. Looking about it is hard to know who pretends in public that does not also delude themselves in private. To live a lie is difficult, so that the mind usually follows the pocketbook. News anchors are merely stupid people, but writers and pundits have more on display and have to get it right to be invited to appear on TV. There are brains at work there, and the compromises behind the faces are serious and disabling.

These are not just our right-wing pundits, by the way. It’s all of them, total spectrum dominance. They are all afraid, or don’t know, to speak up. We are a tightly controlled totalitarian state.

At this time, we are witnessing democratic forces in Ukraine playing out a counter-revolution, and the monsters in Kiev are required to adopt the language of civilized people to put it down. Putin is having none of it. I assume that when Russians in Ukraine are threatened with violence, he will act to protect them. American leaders and pundits will squeal like the stuck pigs. Would that they really were just that. As I have said many times, our leadership class needs to be showing us the toe-twitch at the end of a rope that we handed out to the criminals on the losing side of the last great war.